Still, the narrative moves like a house afire, and its racy energy keeps our attention riveted.
Hardy and Dickens are the probable inspirations for this sprawling, old-fashioned tale of two maritime Newfoundland families.
Award-winning Canadian author Morrisey (Kit’s Law, 2001) sets her second novel among Atlantic “outports”—small fishing communities where generations of the Gale and Osmond families have lived and toiled—in the early years of WWII just prior to Newfoundland’s “confederation” with Canada. A shipwrecked family, the O’Maras, are rescued and housed, but its eldest son Gideon is severely injured and disfigured in a shooting accident. Job Gale volunteers for military service abroad, leaving behind his fearful wife Sare and daughters Clair and Missy. In an increasingly convoluted narrative, first told from Clair’s viewpoint, Morrissey details Job’s return from battle (a haunted shell of himself), his family’s deliverance from the protection of malevolent (Uriah Heep–like) Uncle Sim, and Clair’s career as a schoolteacher and marriage to family friend Luke Osmond. Clair’s young daughter Hannah then picks up the narrative, recounting her own girlhood, the “shame” borne by her pregnant unmarried Aunt Missy, and the chain of (awfully melodramatic) incidents that follow Job’s death, the visit of an “old vet” who had fought beside Job and knows the real source of the latter’s guilty despair, and the revealed truth about Gideon O’Mara’s “accident.” The story groans beneath the weight of Morrissey’s overplotting, but she knows her people intimately, and they’re all memorable. Their salty semiliterate dialogue is perfectly caught “He don’t give we nothing”); but Morrissey’s omniscient voice is often portentously trained (“a scorn that watered itself with rage, anguish, fear and other ills that, left alone, became too monumental to disperse within and is charted into that darker unknown self”). A climactic flurry of reconciliations likewise defies credibility.
Still, the narrative moves like a house afire, and its racy energy keeps our attention riveted.Pub Date: July 15, 2003
ISBN: 0-618-18927-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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